Book Review

Between the Woods and the Water

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

     Patrick Leigh Fermor was an English college dropout who walked across Europe between the two world wars and wrote a trilogy of books about the experience. The first volume, A Time of Gifts, was poorly written and often a chore to read although it did pick up momentum in the second half of the book. The second volume, Between the Woods and the Water, is a vast improvement.

Leigh Fermor begins this book by crossing the Danube River from Slovakia into Hungary. He is immediately greeted with warm welcomes and taken to a procession and celebratory mass in a Catholic church for the end of Lent. He proceeds on to Budapest, has an amazing time, and moves on to hike across the Great Hungarian Plain, the western most steppe of that geographical feature spreading all the way to Mongolia. He continues to have interesting encounters with the country folk and even spends a night with a camp of Romani people. Despite all he has heard about their criminal tendencies, the night passes without incident to his pleasant surprise. As he gets closer to the border with Romania, he starts staying in upper class villas owned by people he made contact with during his previous travels. What is great about this whole section is the vivid description of the landscape, something that he improves on as he goes farther along. His portrayal of the upper classes, as well as the other people he meets, is of higher quality too. Maybe Hungarians are just more exciting people than the Germans he writes about in the previous volume, but they are more interesting and lively in these chapters than anything he had written before.

One interesting part of his journey through Hungary is the intellectual curiosity and passion for reading that Leigh Fermor shows while he stays with the Hungarian aristocrats. One thing he does when he visits them is read the books they have collected in their personal libraries. Some of the weakest and most muddled passages of A Time of Gifts are those where he struggles to explain historical events from the places he visits. It is some seriously bad writing, but here in Between the Woods and the Water he does a far better job of explaining with clarity all the entanglements of people who either migrated to Hungary, traveled through it, or tried to conquer it. This is tough subject matter including tribes of Avars and Goths, later settlements by Huns and Magyars, invasions by Mongols, Germans, and Ottoman Turks, and eventual collaboration with the Habsburg kingdom. He makes some sharp observations about the Magyar language too. His ability to comprehend and describe the syntaxes of all the languages he encounters while traveling is impressive even if he never fully masters the complexities of Magyar. Being able to explain what an agglutinative language is is good enough.

As Leigh Fermor continues into Romania, he keeps calling on contacts he made through others he met in Hungary. His original plans to sleep in forests, fields, and farms gets scrapped as he continuously gets invited into the homes of aristocrats, living a high and leisurely life with them. They enjoy his company so much that their hospitality seems to be without end. The downside of this is that as he travels southwards into Transylvania, most of the people he associates with are ethnic Hungarians and Swabians, but he encounters far fewer Romanians. Transylvania was formerly part of Hungary and Romania incorporated it into their country when the Habsburg Empire broke up after World War I. The author is acutely aware of the tensions between the two groups as, yet he continuously maintains optimism in the possibility of them all uniting under the banner of one nation despite their separate identities.

Socially speaking, he spends a lot of time with an interesting character named Istvan who takes him on a series of adventures. One interesting part is when the two are swimming nude in a river and two farm girls see them, taunt them, and encourage them to chase after them where something or other happens behind a hay rick. What happens there is left to your imagination, but if it involves two naked men it shouldn’t be hard to figure out. Istvan also takes Leigh Fermor and Angela, a married woman from Budapest, on a car ride around the western edge of Transylvania. Leigh Fermor and Angela are having a fling and Istvan wants to make sure they are out of the sight of nosy neighbors who won’t mind their own business. Along the way, the author continues to expound his knowledge about Romanian history as they visit castle ruins in the mountains. He clearly informs his readers about the lives of John Hunyadi and Vlad Tepes, the count who inspired Bram Stoker to write Dracula.

Leigh Fermor then goes off on foot again, trekking through the western edge of Transylvania along the Mures River, connecting again later with the Danube before crossing over into Bulgaria. His descriptions of the mountains are incredible. He uses language to capture the weather, the running water, the plants, the trees, the sounds, the mist,and various other people he meets along the way. Some of the best descriptive writing involves animals; he wakes up one morning to look over a cliff where he sees a golden eagle stretch its wings before taking off in flight, being joined by another eagle. This passage is magnificent.

There isn’t much to dislike about this book. Not all of the writing is perfect, but there are so many more high points in comparison to the first volume of this trilogy that the low points ca be easily overlooked. It is interesting to see how the author’s literary skills grow before your eyes as he continues to write. It also helps that Hungary and Romania are far more interesting countries than Germany or Austria where the author traveled in A Time of Gifts.

Between the Woods and the Water is an exciting travelogue and work of descriptive prose. In it, we see where Patrick Leigh Fermor improves on all the problems he had in the previous book and watching this process of growth unfold is one of this book’s charms. The author is a Romantic at heart and by that I refer specifically to the Romantic movement that preceded the Victorian literary style. But Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Romanticism is a little different; he has the sublimity of nature, the castle ruins, the passage of time, and the push towards transcendence, but at the young age of nineteen, he is too young to wallow in a hopeless longing for the past and the melancholia that the Romantic poets insisted on indulging in. He travels and writes in the here and now as if he loves every minute of it.

 

Book Review

Rendezvous with Rama

by Arthur C. Clarke

     In the 1950s, Arthur C. Clarke wrote a brilliant novel called A Fall of Moondust. It tells a story about a vehicle full of tourists on the moon who get trapped underground in a pit that quickly gets covered over with fine, silky dust. What sets the story apart is that there is no battle between good and evil. There are no protagonists and no villains. Every character in the book is good and their conflict is with the situation, not with other living entities. Every story needs a conflict and this one shifted the role of antagonist to a random occurrence of bad luck. Fast forward to the 1970s and Clarke wrote another novel, Rendezvous with Rama, that similardoesn’t entirely eliminate conflict between characters, but the conflict is displaced to the situation instead. Therein lies the problem.

Far off in the future, when other planets have been colonized, a mysterious cylinder enters our galaxy and heads directly towards the sun. A team of scientists, headed by a commander named Norton, enter the cylinder and find an artificially manufactured world complete with suns, land, a lake with an islands and skyscrapers. The bulk of the story involves their explorations of the craft which they name “Rama” after a Hindu deity. Rama at first appears to be uninhabited, but explorations later reveal that it has creatures they call “biots”, being partly mechanical and partly biological. Their purpose appears to be for manual labor, not to think or analyze. Who they work for is a mystery. Meanwhile a committee of scientists and planetary diplomats hold meetings where they try to make sense of Rama and plan on how to manage the situation.

The concept of “conflict” is especially important in this novel, especially because it is minimized to such an extent. As stated previously, the conflict is between the people and their situation. In a scientific sense, they gather as much information as they can and do their best to interpret it. Otherwise there are some minor disagreements about procedures and interpretations of what little data they collect. The worst that happens is that the government of Mercury, called “Hermians” since “Mercury” was the name the Romans gave to the Greek god Hermes, attaches a nuclear bomb to Rama so they can detonate it in case Rama turns out to be sent with bad intentions. As wrongheaded as the Hermians are, their action is not malicious and, in fact, no one in the book has any evil motives. Even the biots are completely neutral to the point of complete indifference towards the explorers that land on Rama.

On a subtle level, Clarke expresses his favoritism towards science and I think this is the main point of the book. The contrasting viewpoint of religion is provided through the character of Rodrigo, a Christian who explores Rama alongside the other crew members. He insists that Rama has been sent by God to collect all the Christians on Judgment Day when Earth will be destroyed and the faithful will be taken to a better planet. Of course, his interpretation is wrong. Rama, to the best of everybody’s knowledge, serves no religious purpose at all. Still, Rodrigo is just as intelligent, hard-working, and curious as the other crew members so Clarke isn’t saying that religious people are necessarily bad. He is just rejecting their religious paradigm in favor of the more accurate scientific method that involves gathering data and drawing the best conclusions that can be drawn from the amount of evidence provided.

So Arthur C. Clarke clearly shows his favorable view of science, but what does this lead to in the end? The humans are unable to produce any explanation that fully explains Rama other than speculation. Is the author robbing us of a satisfactory climax to the story? Not at all. What he really does is show us the nature of scientific inquiry. Science stats with gathered, verifiable evidence and with insufficient evidence, a final conclusion is impossible. The explorers of Rama did not gather enough evidence to give the scientists enough data to form a complete explanation so we are left without any answers and an open end to the story. Clarke shows us the true nature of science in this way. The character of Rodrigo, representing faith and belief, can not live without meaningful answers so creates a false religious fantasy to fill in the gap in his knowledge even though it proves to be wrong in the end. Scientists, on the other hand, will allow the problem of Rama to remain unsolved until they gather more information, hopefully learning enough to eventually draw a realistic conclusion while being content to admit they don’t know what Rams is until then. It is better to admit when you can’t answer a question than it is to create a fake answer and cling to it as ultimate truth to shelter yourself from uncertainty. Socrates said something to that effect via Plato so many centuries ago.

But is this a successful novel? The best part is that Arthur C. Clarke explains scientific theory through story telling in a simplistic and approachable way while his handling of the religious question is gentle and non-combative. Aside from the theoretical subtext of the writing, it really is an old-fashioned adventure story with roots in Golden Age pulp science-fiction stories where heroes travel to other galaxies, dimensions, planets, or hidden regions of the Earth for the purpose of exploration and conquest. Only in Clarke’s handling of this antiquarian theme, the racist overtones of older times have been eliminated by making Rama uninhabited with the exception of the mindless and harmless biots who do nothing but work. The story is a bit on the light side since the minimalization of conflict makes most of the narrative action based, involving explorers in dangerous situations or else it protrays some light intellectualism with scientists and diplomats trying to solve problems. The characters are weak, serving functional or mechanical narrative purposes rather than humanistic ones. They are cartoonish and lacking in depth. Even the scientific subtext is juvenile, being the type of thing you might learn in junior high school, albeit without the critique of religion that would be forbidden in our regressive 21^st century mentality where people still deny evolution and insist that the Earth is flat and Bigfoot is real.

Rendezvous with Rama did not leave a strong impression. As far as novels without villains go, Arthur C. Clarke’s A Fall of Moondust was realized much more effectively and even a tone of optimism. This might be a good book for introducing scientific theory to a younger audience, but it doesn’t add up to much more than diversion for a seasoned reader. 

 

Book Review

A Time of Gifts

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

     What a disappointment. Patrick Leigh Fermor, a British student, drops out of school at the age of eighteen and goes on a walking tour of Europe that starts in the Netherlands and ends in Constantinople (now Istanbul). He sets out in 1934 and sees the interwar continent from ground level while the menace of the Nazi movement begins taking hold in Germany. It sounds like an exciting subject for a book. Unfortunately, A Time of Gifts, the first book in Leigh Fermor’s trilogy about his travels, doesn’t live up to its promise.

The book starts off poorly with a biographical letter written to a friend that serves as an introduction. We learn that the author is a smart student with undying curiosity for all aspects of education, maybe a potential Renaissance man type. He is also a bit of a screw up, lacking in discipline and direction, seeking out the company of bohemian types who prefer partying to studying. So Leigh Fermor drops out of school and walks across Europe, writing about it all along the way. The problem at this point is that his prose is so choppy that it becomes a chore to read almost immediately.

The writing starts getting better as he walks across the flat, winter landscape of the Netherlands and over the border into Germany. Rather than actually describing what he sees, he instead imagines himself entering into the painted world of Flemish painters, most specifically Breughel, and the enchanting winter scenes they depict. It’s certainly an interesting idea, but I would have been more satisfied if he had written more about what he had actually encountered there.

Leigh Fermor’s descriptions of the northern European landscape doesn’t do much to arouse interest. He tries too hard at times to be poetic, sometimes going into flights of abstract language, complete with arcane Britishisms and vocabulary that hasn’t survived to our current day. A dictionary might come in handy here, but if you look up every word he uses that you don’t know, you may never finish the book. Some of the descriptions are just plain awful. There are some long passages where I couldn’t tell if he was described the landscape, a painting, a book, a piece if music, or the clouds in the sky and ended up not caring enough to re-read them for a full understanding. His attempts at describing the history of the regions he walks though are also impossibly muddled to the point of frustration so that I felt like giving up a few times.

On the plus side, the cities and towns he visits are a little more palatable. In the beginning he sets off with the intention of sleeping in forests, fields, and barns along the way, but he has a knack for making friends with the locals and, like Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, he always depends on the kindness of strangers. Everywhere he goes he meets up with people who are willing to feed and shelter him. Some of them are more interesting than others. Most of them contact other people they know in places further along the road to Leigh Fermor’s destination so he ditches his plans for sleeping like a vagrant and ends up staying with a network of upper class aristocrats. He starts off sleeping in fields and farms, but ends up staying in chateaus and castles.

His impulses also drive him to debauchery which, unfortunately he never describes in detail. In one passage he stays in an apartment with two beautiful young madchens while their parents are away on business. In this, and other scenarios, he doesn’t say everything that goes on between them, but if you read between the lines it is quite obvious. Leigh Fermor has a strange kind of Victorian approach to his writing style that seems out of place for a twentieth century narrative.

Another thing to notice as he travels through Germany and Austria is the creeping encroachment of the Nazis who he briefly encounters at various times. He expresses disdain for them, and so do most of the people he befriends, but he doesn’t condemn them very loudly. H even socializes with them amicably a couple times; I don’t think his intention is to warm up to them, but rather to keep out of trouble. Being an English citizen in Germany at that time could be risky and he seemed to be mostly concerned with playing it safe, not with sympathizing with their cause. He is actually open to speaking with anybody he meets, even with the Romani and Jewish populations that the European host societies routinely treat as second-class citizens.

The narrative starts improving when the author gets to Vienna. While staying at a Salvation Army homeless shelter, he meets a slightly eccentric man named Konrad who comes from the Frisian Islands off the north coast of the Netherlands. Konrad convinces him to make money by sketching people’s portraits, so Leigh Fermor goes door to door with his sales pitch and does well-enough to live a little more comfortably. The scenes inside the people’s apartments are some of the most amusing and interesting parts of this book. He does a good job of describing urban Vienna too.

From there, Leigh Fermor walks east along the Danube, skirting the southern border of Slovakia and eventually crossing the river into Hungary. What is interesting about this is that the prose continues to get better the farther along he goes. Reading this book is like watching somebody learning how to write and making improvements with each passing page. This only makes me wish that he had revised the first half of the book more effectively; starting a book with disastrous writing and progressing towards smoother, more polished and descriptive prose, albeit prose that is average at best, is not a good writing strategy. But at least the auther redeems himself a bit by the end.

My biggest criticism of this travel narrative is that Leigh Fermor followed a literary axiom too closely. They say a good author not only knows about what to put into their work, but also what to leave out or eliminate. Leigh Fermor leaves out too much. His descriptions of the countryside are sparse, especially in the beginning and he meanders into poorly written explanations of historical events instead, and never getting around to saying what he actually feels as he walks. He never mentions the cold or the wind. His feet never ache or get sore. He never feels tired or hungry. He simply doesn’t address all five of the human senses. When he says he gets drunk, he never explains how that actually feels. He leaves too much up to the imagination so that his prose comes off as flat, shallow, and one dimensional.

A Time of Gifts captured my interest because I have backpacked across Europe and went to a lot of the places that Patrick Leigh Fermor visited. I wanted to see how he described them as they were in the 1930s. His execution of the writing didn’t satisfy my curiosity, but considering it improved a bit in the second half, I wouldn’t say it was a waste of time reading this. Hopefully the second volume of this trilogy will be better. 

 

Book Review

Herds

by Stephen Goldin

     Is it reasonable for one community to concern themselves with the welfare of another community if the two groups share no common interests and the helping community derives no benefit from their service? Stephen Goldin’s obscure science-fiction novel Herds examines this ethical question.

The premise starts with Garnna, a member of the Zarticku who are a race of beings on another planet. Their living conditions might be described as utopian by some ideologues. They are a crime-free society where individuals belong to pod groups referred to as “herds”. The Zarticku are so perfectly honest that simply questioning one about some kind of misdoing will result in a truthful answer which may lead to retraining or re-education in most cases. Rarely, if someone needs to be punished, the ultimate penalty is social isolation, something so horrifying to the Zarticku that few would ever commit such an egregious offense to wind up in that situation.

This is the society in which Garnna lives. His job is to explore other universes, other planets, and the creatures that inhabit them. This is done by separating his mind from his body, making it free to travel vast distances that would be impossible with the limitations of his physical body. So where would an outer space creature from a utopian planet go? You guessed it! Earth! And what country do think he lands in? America! Should this even need to be explained? Originality is not a strong point in this novel.

All the Earthly action happens in the conservative enclave of San Marcos county in California. The locals are red blooded rednecks, a lot like the Texans in Easy Rider who arrest Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper for having long hair and riding motorcycles. In the mountains, on the outskirts of town, a hippy commune has been set up by a social-psychology professor who wants to study why utopian communities typically fail. Garnna sees these two groups as sub-herds within the larger herd of the human race. The professor’s name is Polaski, almost like “Polanski” as in “Roman Polanski”; it’s hard to tell if this similarity is intentional in light of the initial event that sets off the story. Near the commune is a cabin where the wife of a lawyer lives. The lawyer, Stoneham, has political ambitions, so when his wife asks for a divorce, he kills her and tries to make it look like the Manson Family murders by writing “Death to Pigs” on the wall in her blood. His brilliant plan is to frame Polaski for the murder and use this as an excuse to drive the unpopular hippies off their commune. He thinks this will elevate him to the status of hero in the town and make his electoral victory inevitable.

But of course, this is a novel, so something has to go wrong. While Garnna is out of his body and exploring the great and glorious country of America, he witnesses Stoneham’s murder. Since he is invisible, being out of his body and all, Stoneham does not know of his presence so he proceeds with his plans to whip up a lynch mob to run the commune members off their grounds. Garnna, feeling disgusted by the murder and the motive, goes back to the Zarticku and asks for permission to return and fix the situation on Earth. The Zarticku command him not to go, but Garnna disobeys.

Meanwhile, the county sheriff arrests Polaski at Stoneham’s request even though he has doubts about the professor’s guilt. Then Garnna makes mental contact with a hippy named Debby who has psychic powers that become stronger when she smokes marijuana. Debby proceeds to help Maschen solve the case. Having explained that much, I’ll say this novel isn’t really as far out as it might sound.

The strongest point of the narrative structure is the way the three herds play off against each other. The San Marcos rednecks and the counter-culture commune members are an all-too obvious source of conflict. Adding the Zarticku into the mix adds a whole other dimension. They represent a perfect society, or at least on the surface it seems perfect. The hippies are concerned with creating a perfect society in opposition to the ugly towns people who persecute them for being different. The fact that being different is a crime in both the redneck community and the Zarticku community casts a dark shadow over the utopianism of the Zarticku. In the end, Garnna gets punished for obeying his own conscience and going against the commands of the Zarticku authorities. To a lesser extent, Maschen suffers a similar fate since his pursuit of truth in the murder case will end his career as sheriff. Both characters respond to a moral calling that is higher than simply following orders. In fact, the murder case would most likely not have been solved if Maschen didn’t value truth over loyalty. Serving the common good necessitates individuality at times. Garnna also learns that individuality is sometimes necessary for problem solving.

In the middle of all this is the commune where a collective group of individuals attempt to build a utopia for the sake of a researcher who wants to improve the lot of humanity. The commune in this story fails because the lynch mob attacks them and destroys all their property. Based on research I have read on the topic of communal living, relations with the host society is one of the factors that needs to be effectively managed in order to assure the stability of the commune. Other factors that lead to communal failures include uneven or unfair delegation of work, mismanagement of necessary resources such as money and food, ineffective gatekeeping, poor conflict management, and authoritarian leadership styles. Yes, more egalitarian and democratic leadership strategies tend to foster group cohesion more than strict bullying which tends to cause conflict between leaders and followers. Despite my massive sociological digression, I’ll just say that Stephen Goldin is on to something here.

The tightly-wound narrative structure is a little too neat for my tastes, however. The elements of the story are placed together in an almost geometrical configuration. There are no loose threads or dead ends and everything is orderly, shiny, and wrapped up perfectly like a birthday gift with a bow on top, ready to be delivered safely and quickly to the reader with all parts in order. There isn’t any room for noise in this narrative. In fact it’s so finely-tuned that it runs so much like machinery that it lacks enough emotional depth and unpredictability to make the novel a little lifeless. Personally I’d be happier with a little sloppiness in a book as a trade off for my crappy Windows operating system which doesn’t run smoothly at all. Get that digital junk software running with cybernetic precision and I’ll be a much happier person.

One other positive aspect of Herds is the character development. The text is written as third-person omniscient so we have access to the private thoughts of all the main characters. This is effectively done as each one inhabits a singular mind of their own with its distinct personality and preoccupations. This makes the contrast between each individual bold. The downside of this is that each person is specifically crafted to represent a specific idea, each representing a narrative function in the plot development. Thus, the depth of each character only goes so far and it is hard to imagine any of them being anything other than what they are in this particular story. It is like how when I was in high school and we used to joke about how our teachers all lived in shoe boxes because we couldn’t imagine them having any life outside the school. This isn’t a major problem, but it is something that makes the novel fall a little short of its potential. Then again, the aim of the writing is not excessively high to begin with.

Overall, the biggest problem with Herds is its unoriginality and its predictability. Basing the murder on the death of Sharon Tate and trying to blame the crime on a commune leader named Polaski reeks of manipulation and opportunism considering this was written in the early 1970s. The author probably looked at the Manson murders and thought he had a readymade plot device at his fingertips. The character motivations and the solving of the crime are pedestrian and cliché too. In fact, having Debby use her psychic powers to help Maschen solve the crime comes off as a lazy thinking. Rather than going through the trouble of conducting an investigation and holding a trial, it’s just easier to have a psychic do all the work. The literary realization is less than spectacular in the end.

But what about the moral underpinning of the story? I would argue that it is the strongest point of the book. Garnna lives in a society that is peaceful, meaningful, and socially fulfilling but it is also massively conformist and rigidly authoritarian. His desire to help another herd, the human herd of the hippy commune, leads him to a higher moral calling and the realization that all living creatures are equal and should be treated as such. Helping another community in need is part of this vision, even if it does not bring any gain to whoever does the helping. Herds obviously does not sufficiently exhaust any discussion on this ethical issue, one which has been debated by philosophers from day one, but it does an excellent job of introducing the concept and encouraging further examination.

Herds is not a great book, but as a product of its time, being the 1970s, it is a bit of a curiosity. Its strengths and its flaws run along parallel lines, making it readable but not particularly mind-expanding. It probably works best as a book for younger readers while also being too dated for them to see its historical context. I wouldn’t go far out of my way to find a copy of Herds, but if you see it around somewhere at a reasonable price and have a taste for exploring lesser-known works of fiction, it is worth picking up.

 

Book Review

The Balkan Trilogy

by Olivia Manning

     Olivia Manning is not a well-known writer. Why this is I really don’t know. The Balkan Trilogy is a great accomplishment and any young writer who is serious about learning how the craft should take a few cues from it. There are three aspects of great writing that Manning masters. One is the building of characters through dialogue, another is a strong sense of place, and the third is the building of tension and suspense.

The Balkan Trilogy tells the story of Harriet and Guy Pringle, a young couple who have just gotten married after knowing each other for a week. The two arrive in Bucharest, Romania since Guy works for the British Legation, teaching English literature at the university. The British Legation is a branch of the colonial ministry and the British relation with Romania is one that is a mixture of political alliance and colonial possession. The first two books, “The Great Fortune” and “The Spoilt City” take place in Bucharest while the third, “Friends and Heroes”, takes place in Athens where the Pringles go to escape from the Nazi invasion of Romania. They get involved with a whole cast of other characters along the way. One of the most memorable is Yakimov, an exiled Belorussian prince who has fallen into poverty since his wife died and his inheritance has dwindled down to a trickle. There are other colonial bureaucrats and journalists in Bucharest. The expatriate community is a network of socialites and they have little more than loose associations with the Romanian people who mostly stay in the background.

It is fair to say that there is not any overarching plot in this trilogy. Rather there are a lot of subplots, or I might actually call them “micro-plots”, that support an overarching theme. That theme is the shaky relationship between Harriet and Guy. Both of them are naive and both also came from lower class backgrounds, a detail that isn’t thoroughly explored but does, however, give insight into why the two of them act the way they do. Harriet is smart and perceptive, possibly the most intelligent character in the novels. Her desire is to get closer to her husband and discover who he really is while also discovering Romanian society and getting to know herself. Guy, on the other hand, is gregarious by nature, always willing to help the downtrodden and generous to a fault. This is both the best and the worst trait of his personality. Guy is book-smart and ideological, but tragically naive when it comes to other people. He wants to spend time with everybody he meets, everybody, that is, except Harriet who he treats like a kid sister that he doesn’t want tagging along while he goes off to do what he thinks of as more important things. Sometimes these things involve socializing with people who are down and out, looking for ways to take advantage of him.

From the beginning, we get a clear picture of who Guy and Harriet are. This is primarily done through dialogue, not just with the Pringles but also with the other people they interact with. The characters stand alone as individual humans, but their personalities and psychology are built for the reader by how they interact with others. They are who they are but they become much more because of how they socialize; it is a gestalt effect where the overall picture is much larger than the sum of its parts. Olivia Manning isn’t the only writer to have employed this technique but she does do it better than most any other authors I have read. Some readers compare her to Jane Austen but I think she is better at dialogue mostly because I find Austen to be a crashing bore.

The theme of the Pringles’ marriage carries through the whole trilogy. The first book intoruduces this theme which is especially seen where Guy directs a stage production of Shakespeare, despite the political turbulence that has begun to set in. During rehearsals, Guy all but commands Harriet to stay away even though she wants to be a part of the project. In the second book, as the political situation gets worse, the two of them start to grow closer together. When the monarchy gets overthrown by Antonescu, the fascist Iron Guard starts crawling out of the woodwork, and the German Nazi presence in Bucharest grows on a daily basis, the Pringles begin to face some hard decision making. This is exacerbated by Guy allowing two people to stay in the apartment, Yakimov, who is homeless, and Sasha Drucker, the son of a Jewish banker who abandoned his military service because the soldiers where persecuting Jews. An even more absurd situation occurs when the Legation flies a scholar named Primrose into Bucharest to give a lecture when the entire country is being shut down by the Nazis and British citizens are being commanded to leave the country. Although Harriet continues to feel alienated from Guy and the rest of the expat community, she is drawn by circumstances to spend more time with him, even if it is solely for pragmatic reasons. The peak of their relationship comes when they take a retreat in the nearby mountains and have some serious discussions about their future.

And that theme continues when they move on to Greece. The German occupation of Bucharest puts their lives in danger, so they flee to Athens, a city that Harriet immediately becomes enamored with. She hopes that being there will bring her closer together with her husband, but he just returns to being his old self again. He spends most of his time socializing in cafes or working on lectures even though he isn’t formally employed. As the Italian and German fascists begin closing in on Greece, though, food becomes scarce, the situation becomes dire, and again the two of them are forced to spend time together because of the miserable circumstances. Guy continues to be optimistic and naive; he never gives up hope even though an aristocrat who has influence over the Legation in Greece and possible ties to the fascists keeps stabbing him in the back as Guy tries to get the Legation school running again. Guy also puts on variety shows for the benefit of the British soldiers who have shown up in Athens to defend Greece against the Nazis. This offends his boss and Guy can’t comprehend why. His strength of character and desire to do good for everybody while keeping a stiff upper lip is proven to be a symptom of weakness because he misreads these situations. He begins looking like he needs public adoration to feel good about himself, a flaw in his character which prevents his marriage from success. There are times when you might feel like slapping him and telling him to wake up and look at reality. Harriet, on the other hand, continues to get stronger. She develops an intuition for reading people that is more accurate than Guy’s perceptions. Even if she doesn’t solve all their problems, she does a good job of explaining the psychology of the other characters. By the time they leave Greece, Harriet has Guy and herself all figured out too. She realizes she has more potential as a career woman than he does as a lecturer due to his chronic problem of misplacing his priorities and ambitions. Some critics have criticized Manning for not sufficiently addressing feminist themes, but I think this unfair because the strength of Harriet’s character and intelligence speaks for itself. Just because Manning isn’t hysterically ranting about destroying the patriarchy doesn’t mean she isn’t sensitive to women’s issues. Besides, battering people over the head with a message doesn’t always mean it will be received; sometimes being subtle is a stronger way of communicating. This is something people in the 21^st century don’t seem to understand. We live in an age of loudmouthed know-nothings who think they know everything.

While The Balkan Trilogy is largely about human relationships, these relationships take place against a background that is atmospheric, historical, and political. The second most distinct aspect of Manning’s prose is her ability to capture the feeling of a time and place with her language. For one thing, the dramatic shifts in the Romanian climate do a lot to move the pacing along. From the balmy and humid summers to the rainy autumn and heavy winter snowfall with its perpetually grey skies, she creates an environment you can really feel. She does just as well with the climate in Greece. Her descriptions of Bucharest and Athens are accurate as well. I know because I have spent time in both cities. The descriptions of Bucharest, called the Paris of the East in the pre-communist era, are vivid and show all sides of the city. Romania has always been at the crossroads of history. Once an outpost of the Roman Empire and a thoroughfare for migrating tribes from the Slavic lands and Central Asia, they were eventually conquered by the Ottomans who had ambitions for seizing territories farther west. In the cafe culture, street life, peasant markets, and restaurants you can see the ebbs and tides of history washing through the city. The aristocrats, mimicking the ways of the French upper classes are sinking into irrelevance. The peasants and Romani people ply their trades on the streets. The Jews are eternal scapegoats, and the English are popular because the Romanian king is allied to Great Britain. Things change quickly when Romania ditches the U.K. to join the axis with Hitler while Hungary claims Transylvania and the Soviet Unions claims Bukovina and Besarabia which is now Moldova. The social atmosphere of Bucharest, as portrayed by Manning, is fickle and emotionally detached. This contrasts sharply when the Pringles visit the mountains and have some freedom to contemplate their lives. The scenery is described as majestic and elysian although a shadow enters the paradise when Harriet sees the cruel way that the peasants treat their domestic animals.

The atmosphere is described just as vividly in Athens with its busy cafes, noisy bars, and restaurants. This inner city atmosphere contrasts nicely with the time the characters spend in the calm of gardens, on the beach, visiting the Acropolis, and hiking in the hills and forests that surround the city. The atmosphere continues to darken as the fascists progress towards the borders of Greece, food becomes scarce, and the country is plunged into a winter with downpouring rain. It is an atmosphere of hope deferred while the city plunges into the misery of starvation and fear.

Then there is the building of tension, another aspect of Mannin’g writing that makes it high quality. On a small scale, micro-plots are used frequently to keep the narrative interesting. One such micro-plot involves the arrival of an inconspicuous British secret agent in Bucharest who conspires to blow up Romania’s oil reserves if the Nazis ever take over the country. Guy gets involved with this and brings home a paper with the details of a bomb, but the conspiracy gets thwarted and nothing comes of it. The paper comes up again later in a second micro-plot involving Yakimov, the homeless former prince from White Russia who gets taken in by Guy to sleep in the spare bedroom. Yakimov is a complete leech who refuses to work and lives by begging for money and eating other people’s food. He gets angry at Guy for a petty reason and steals the paper then hands it over to a Nazi official in northern Transylvania. While Yakimov is angry at Guy, his ultimate motivation is to curry favor with the Nazi so he can get some food from him. Yakimov really is shallow and amoral, kind of like stray dog that begs for food and never reciprocates the kindness. He never considers that this action could lead to the Iron Guard harassing the Pringles and chasing them out of Romania. There are literally dozens of other subplots involving the affairs of the Legation, the activities of the journalists, and the relations between the large cast of characters in the Balkan region of Europe.

Another impressive way that Manning builds tension is with the creeping specter of World War II getting closer and closer. At the beginning, the movement of the Nazis across Europe happens far away and is of little concern to the expats in Romania. They are worried but the threat isn’t close enough to actually prevent them from pursuing an ordinary life. As the Nazis come closer to the Romanian border and finally occupy the country, showing up more and more around the city of Bucharest, it is like an ominous dark cloud moving over the sun. The closer the war comes, the more British nationals from their community start to leave and living in Bucharest becomes more and more precarious. Finally acts of violence against members of the Legation come like lightning strikes and it becomes obvious that the Pringles have to leave. What is so brilliant in the writing is the way the way the war starts off as little more than a small noise in the distance and becomes louder as it approaches until it is deafening roar in the narrative. When the Pringles arrive in Athens, the process starts all over again. At first they wax optimistically when the Greek army defeats the Italians invading from Albania, but then it wanes as the Germans move in and begin bombing Greece. The story moves gradually from joy to doom and you can see how it effects the characters psychologically like a noose tightening around their necks as they realize that trouble is coming their way.

It is almost tempting to say that this trilogy is a work of perfection if only there weren’t some glaring mistakes. There are a few spots where the narrative degenerates into purple prose and Manning also has a tendency to use long lists of adjectives that come off as amateurish and silly. There certainly isn’t enough of this to ruin the book though. Yet another problem is some sloppy editing. I usually overlook this when reading good literature, but it is almost embarrassing at times in Manning’s writing. In one scene after Yakimov has fled Romania and arrived in Istanbul, he walks into the Pringles’ apartment. After that he disappears from the narrative until they meet up with him again in Athens. In other scenes, characters speak up in conversations without the author telling us they were present. Some of these characters were never even introduced into the story so you scratch your head in wonder trying to figure out who they are or why they are there. The proofreading was done hastily to the detriment of the writing.

The Balkan Trilogy comes close to perfection in terms of both style and content. The story is deeply engaging and smooth, often moving at a fast enough pace to keep you going despite its length of over 900 pages. It is easy to read and as anyone who knows about writing will tell you, writing something that is easy to read, especially while maintaining a certain level of complexity, is extremely difficult to do. I don’t know how good Manning’s other books are, but she certainly hit the ball out of the park on this one. The Balkan Trilogy deserves to be a classic.